What are your programming stories?

[Bobble68]

Hi everyone! I got the curious the other day about the kind of antics people on this forum get up to, so I decided to make this topic.

What interesting programming stories do you have? They don't have to be Love2D related (though they can be)

[knorke]

Long time ago I made a tool for an online RTS game.
It could be run while watching a replay: It collected some data and afterwards it created some graphics and statistics.
(For example a heatmap where units were destroyed, how players had spent their resources, build orders)
Eventually, I made a bot that could sit in the lobby as a spectator and when the game was over then it created the statistics. It was several png images embedded in a html page that also contained some text.

I was quite a horrible construction of C++, Lua and delicate setup of external tools but it worked.
If I recall, I only knew how to save .bmp files but those were too big to upload. So the bot used irfanview to convert the images via commandline and then used an FTP program to upload.

It was funny to run the bot for a day and then read through the chatlog how players had reacted.
Sometimes they would try to talk to the bot. Sometimes there were long chats when the statistics showed that somebody had not helped the team, or people would point to something in the statistics that showed they had played well etc.
The various webhosters are long dead, only picture I can find right now is this:



Another time I played some multiplayer browser game, one of those games where you build up your empire and it ran for years. Basically the prototype of all those horrible mobile games, except it was entirely text or spreadsheet based.
With my tool you could copy lists of coordinates from the game and it would create maps, so you could see the borders between alliances etc. The maps were drawn with text symbols. There was also an option to output BB-Code with tons of color-tags and url-tags, so that you could copy-paste colored maps into message boards. The url-tag was used as tooltip, so it would show extra info in the browser status bar if you hovered the mouse on a point on the map.
There were also some other tools that would take too long to explain.
Anyway, the most exciting part for me was this: At first I only shared the tool to members of our alliance. But then someone actually cared enough to steal it!

[dusoft]

In the time of Travian (yeah, one of those online games with time spans reserved for turns back around 2004) a friend asked me, if it was possible to have him notified once the enemy army started to march to their territory (this would be announced in advanced, giving you usually hours to react, were you to check often enough).

So I made a small scraper script that would login under my friend's username, check if there were any notifications regarding enemies and relay these via SMS gateway to his mobile phone. It worked and he could get an early warning to enemies coming.

[soulmata]

Over the past year I have gone from having 0 game development experience to having a commercial release on steam. I had toyed with LOVE in the past, but the truth is, a year ago, I didn't know what the difference between "framework" and "engine" was. So, take this simple picture from Endless Dark as an example:



That button there, well, it just looks like a button, right. Well, that button is an invisible SUIT button from a custom hack of SUIT, sitting on top of 2 semi-transparent rectangles that are themselves drawn over a semi-transparent image of a + symbol that itself is drawn over a blue box. All of these infer their position from the other boxes near them so they always line up correctly, and then in turn a ton of state is derived based on what scene the player is in. Just to make 1 button. That button in turn has a function associated to either return a list to my UI function of what options to render, or respond to player input, based on context. Then the resultant relevant version of the button is displayed to the player based on their story progress. All of that is so that I have a stateful button that is not just a collection of sprites I pick from, but one that can highlight and respond to game state changes.

ALL of that was stuff I didn't know how to do 1 year ago.

So I guess the crazy story here is: the above is 0->1 year of experience. And to me that is crazy. Anyone can do it if you are determined enough.

[marclurr]

The programming thing I've done that amuses me the most was when I got really into spin classes for a short period about 10 years ago. My gym released them for booking in their online portal 3 days in advance at some god awful time of the morning. I kept missing out on the good timeslots so I wrote a bot to log into my account and book all the ones I might want immediately after they were released. It was running on the Raspberry PI that took me over a year to finally get so I was excited to have a little project for it. It worked really well, but that gym also blacklisted you from attending any exercise classes if you booked and don't show up enough times. I'd originally intended to log in each morning and just cancel the ones I didn't want, but I never got round to it and the bot effectively banned me from classes in about 2 days.

[BrotSagtMist]

Your bot banned you from real life, what a plot twist.